Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, or other electronic equipment. The semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductor layers over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography and etching processes to form circuit components and elements on the semiconductor substrate.
The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature size, which allow more components to be integrated into a given area. These smaller electronic components also require smaller package that utilizes less area or smaller heights, in some applications.
New packaging technologies have been developed to improve the density and functions of semiconductor devices. These relatively new types of packaging technologies for semiconductor devices face manufacturing challenges.